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And this money is absolutely free.


Right now, only one person says he will do this.














Delaware’s 1 percent reported average income of $863,734 in 2012.  There are 4747 filers in Delaware who meet the 1% threshold.

What that means is that half of those, 2424 have to make more than $863,734…

Currently everyone making more than $60,000 each year, pays the same marginal rate. … So all these 2424 pay the highest rate of 6%…..

So if all 2424 average above $863,734 then the minimum income available to be taxed would be this product of both.

2525  X  $863,734  =   $2,093,691,216   That is as in two billion…

Therefore, if we raise tax rates on this group, with each percent, we would raise $20,936,912. ($21 million) Enough to fund all of Delaware’s casino losses for a full year or the average spent on Race To The Top per each of its 5 year cycle; or a one percent raise for all of Delaware’s state employees.

Keep this in light of the startling fact that this group grew incomes at 15%….  15% of $2 billion is $300 million.   So whereas this group of 2424 top 0.5%’rs grew incomes at $300 million yet paid the same rate as someone making $60,000… that person stuck making $60,000 lost income at 1.6% but still paid the same rate as those earning a combined $300 million a year….

Which is why saying we can’t fund seniors credits for school taxes is nothing less than a joke…. Perhaps such might be true, IF WE WERE TAXING THE TOP 0.5% AT ABSURD HIGHLY RIDICULOUS RATES.  But we aren’t.. 

  • California charges 13.3%… It’s economy is booming btw.
  • Oregon charges 9.9%… Doing well too.
  • Minnesota at 8.95%… No harm there.
  • Iowa 8.98%… Those corn huskers are quite happy there.
  • New York 8.82%… Everyone “Hearts” NY.
  • Our neighbor, New Jersey?  8.97%….

Even Republican Scott Walker’s state, Wisconsin charges higher:  7.65%!!!

There is a lot of room to expand….

Here is the recommended rate schedule that Delaware needs to implement.

  • Incomes over $400 billion   @ 12 %
  • Incomes between $400 and $100 billion  @ 11%
  • Incomes between $100 and $1 billion  @ 10%
  • incomes between  $1 billion and $400 million @ 9%
  • incomes between $400 million and $100 million  @ 8 %
  • incomes between $100 million and 1 million.   @  7%
  • No change for incomes under $1 million…

The reason for the above is contingent on how much each level of income impacts the local economy.  Those who don’t provide a local benefit with their purchases, should be taxed higher than those who do.  And keep in mind this is all taxed marginally… That means the the first million for all of the 2424 is taxed the same, and only those amounts that expand over into the higher brackets will pay out at a higher rate….

For any sacrifices to be borne at all by those losing income at rates of 1.6% without ramping up the donations exculpated from those whose incomes rose 15% over the same identical time frame, is simply unjust, immoral, and positively Un-American.

These people have to be taxed more.  No if’s; No and’s; No but’s.

It is so obvious… Like hitting you in the eye with a big Pizza Pie!

Now that we’ve started growing our economy, it has become a persistent theme… “We need money for this”; “we need money for that”; “we need money for both and for other things too”.  “We need money”, pure and simple.. Am I not right? Pick up any paper. Listen to any radio newscast; read any internet news source…. (did you notice I completely ignored television entirely? You should ignore them too if you don’t already ).

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but (and this is a theoretical question…):  when you want something that you don’t have….a)  do you go asking for it among people who don’t have any themselves, or b) among people who have lots of it to spare?

Hmmm. I wonder…. (finger on chin; one eye looking at the sky)  Should I ask those who have, … or those who don’t have….

Which makes Markell’s asking our Seniors to forgo their credit on school taxes allegedly to balance the budget, nonsensical..  Especially when the top 1% of Delawareans by simply adding a few lines to the tax code. can cough up $70 million a year… (enough to roughly fund 3 years of casino shortfalls) and not experience any loss of spendable cash,

So why would someone ignore those who COULD give, and threaten those who have NOTHING to give?  There are probably many reasons, but none meet the level of good straight forward reasoning… For if you truly want something, asking someone who doesn’t have it is absolutely pointless….

What Seniors don’t have, the 1% does have;  (that is why they are in the one percent.)

So, being theoretical again, wouldn’t it make great sense to turn the tables on Markell and actually go forward and spitefully raise the taxes on HIS friends, those in the top one percent, oh… let us say…. about the same percent that his tax hike would have hit Seniors pinching pennies on limited incomes… to around the percentage of a 100% increase….

So it would come out that on incomes over let us say, $100 million dollars, instead of the 6% they are currently assessed, (the exact same percent as someone earning $60,000) we would hit them with a 100% increase (another 6%)  and bump that owed amount to 12%…  We could then graduate the layers from 6% to 9% over a range of income levels.. and except for the rates on the top echelons, the percentages would still be lower than neighboring New Jersey.

This gives us $70 million in new revenue. Each and every year… We can even blow it on the casino’s if we want….

We need the General Assembly to respond to Markell’s challenge with a tax increase of this nature.   Now, the point is really not so much of whether it passes or not..  But the point is that by having a progressive coalition sponsor and at the very least, put it on the floor, (especially those who hail from districts where doing such would make them a cult hero for life, and cost them zero switched votes since no millionaire would ever vote for them anyway), it becomes a bone of contention, and a topic of conversation in letters-to-the-editor pages across this state; on Al Mascitti and Rick Jensen; on WDDE and other WGMD down south, and gets talked about on both sides…

Because there is a funny thing that always happens when good ideas get talked about in the open, and one can hear both sides.  They start to get followers.  And as more and more followers pile on, as more and more support for this bill becomes apparent..  as more people start supporting what appears to be a very common sensical means of pulling our society back together, of fixing the broken door jambs that have been stepped over too long, of repairing leaking cracks too long ignored across our aged infrastructure (in both physical and human capital), then Jack will rue the day he ever threatened Senior with tax hikes they could never pay…. while ignoring those who can easily pay 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 times the amounts we will be asking of them.

And the idea that we have to cut back now on very essential stuff in what is now a richly growing economy,  all because we don’t have money when it is there, right in front of us, dangling for us to take it: is plain stupid.  Really…  Would YOU not cash in a winning Powerball ticket because you didn’t want Powerball LLC. to lose any money over you?   Somethings are smart. Some things are really dumb… Not cashing in a winning Powerball, or not raising the tax rates on the top one percent, are both…. about as equally dumb.

The point of placing this bill on the table, is that if we generate significant conversation and make a run at passing a 12% top state tax rate, or even just get that conversation out there, and get 500,000 Delawarean voter’s hopes up that yes, this legislature might finally do something responsible, and still fail by being one or two votes short… the very fact we did so helps it become far easier to have the General Assembly slip in and vote on the last day of session, a bill that raises the wealthy’s rates by 1%, or 2%, or 3%, or 4%…. And that, would be a godsend to Seniors…..

Society across the board has simply outgrown all this “cut taxes to grow” hype.  We tried it; it failed; now we remember the good years back when taxes were a tiny bit higher and we were all, everyone of us, far much happier, far better off, and all of us facing what looked to be a very, very bright future. …


A tidbit upon which historians will agree, was ultimately why the Democrats were not able to capitalize on the phenomenal results of today’s thriving booming American economy.

Republican policies created this imbalance.  But it is Obama who as CEO, gets the blame for its residual effects.

How to fix it?  A marginally accurate 73% tax on incomes over $73 million would turn the tables nicely with no residual effect to the other 99.9% of the population…..

Came across an amazing chart from the Paris School of Economic’s database.  It allows you to customize your search for any time or place over the world.

My area of expertise is within the US and here is what I wanted to see:  the percentage of national income earned by the top 0.01%…. not just the top 1%, but the top-tip 0.01%.

Tax rate impact firsttax rate impact secondtax rate impact thirdtax rate impact fourthtax rate impact fifth

This shows the past 100 years of national income percentage earned by the top 0.01%. There are some very striking facts noticed by those looking at this data for the first time.

1) The year 2012 was one of the record highest, beaten only by two years during WWI when the rest of the world was embroiled in war, and our top echelon were selling to both sides…. If one extracts that exception, then in 2012 we gave the top 0.01% (one hundredth of one percent) more of our national income than at any time previously recorded.

2) The Great Depression did little to affect the income percentages (1928-1932);  Roosevelt however (1933-onward), did a lot.

3) During America’s most prosperous times ever, after WWII made us the sole global economy, the incomes of the top 0.01% stayed under 1% of national income across the next 43 years. (1943-1986)

4) The Reagan Tax Cut of 1986 caused a doubling of the top 1%’s income in just 2 years. from 1% in 1986 to 1.99% in 1988.

5) The percentage again dropped under 2% after Clinton’s tax hike in 1992 causing a robust expansion, but passed that 2% mark in 1997 never to return.

6) During the “w” Bush years, the percentage continuously climbed peaking in 2007 and would have peaked higher in 2008 but the recession clipped the last two months off that year. Despite that, 2008 was the 2nd highest grossing percentage up to that time (discounting the WWI anomaly) across almost 100 years of data.

7) The Great Recession (2008-9)  as did the Great Depression (1929-32), had little effect on the top 0.01% percentage of national income. At no point did their yearly take dip below 3%, a mark first crossed in 2005 (if one continues disregarding the anomaly of the First World War).

8) The rebound ability of an economy at large is hampered when more money collects at the top and is not returned as investment to the bottom. Though small in percentage points, those difference of those 3 percentage points ( from under 1.0 to 4.0) translates to $500 billion that did not impact our economy because it went to less than 31,000 Americans.  Considering our TARP was passed only for $800 billion, we only saw $300 billion net running through our economy. because $500 billion of the $800 billion was handed over to less than 31,000 people then quickly whisked away to foreign bank accounts beyond the reach of the IRS.

9) Although difficult to state through all the multiple influences that impact economies daily, the extensive overview shown by this chart makes it clear that were we to have another great recession, we should first use the incomes of our top 0.01% to first rebuild our national economy as did Roosevelt, and not assume that those wealthy will do so voluntarily as did our creators and negotiators behind this current rebound.

10)  Data from 2013 will be most interesting.  The Bush Tax Cuts for the top 0.05% were rescinded that year, and at that point, our economy took off ( at least when Republicans weren’t threatening to shut it all down).  If it does indeed show a drop in the top 1%’s income, then we will know that in order to have robust recoveries, those at the top need to be taxed more, not less.

As for politics, this needs to be taken to heart.  Anyone who argues for less taxes on the top 1%, be they Democrat or Republican, needs to be shown the door…. We now have sufficient data to know with certainty, and from it, we can see all evidence points that higher marginal tax rates do benefit the middle class and subsequently the economy at large…..

This historical chart rings that out, clear as a bell at the end of a day’s trading…..

Having just returned from a Gates sponsored seminar  “ to further hardwire the Common Core curriculum ” (Gate’s words; not mine; notice he said “curriculum“) Mr. White opines us on what he learned.  He was most taken with a story from Deborah Ball, now dean of education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who was teaching her third grade students about odd and even numbers, when one student, Sean, said that he thought some numbers were both odd and even.

It is obvious this was an exercise at the conference.  For Mr. White asks us how we should respond…. We are given three options.

Teacher A responded that there are no numbers that are both odd and even and that you can always tell which are odd and which are even by which are divisible by two and which are not. Those evenly divisible by two are even and the others are odd. She then moved on with her lesson plan.

Teacher B asks the student to explain why he thinks some numbers are both odd and even. He says that because two goes into some even numbers (like 6 or 10) an odd number of times, those numbers are both odd and even. The teacher says that is a very interesting thought, but then goes on to explain the rule to him as had been done by Teacher A and moves on with the lesson.

Ok, those were almost the same, so you know the Common Core set up is coming up in …. C

Teacher C suspends her lesson plan and asks the class to think about the student’s conjecture. They talk about it and the teacher provisionally calls these odd/even numbers, Sean numbers, saying that is what mathematicians do when they explore a new idea. The class subsequently discovers or notices that every other even number is a “Sean number” and they then discover what kind of number results (odd, Sean or non-Sean) when “Sean numbers” are added to other “Sean numbers”, to “non-Sean even numbers” and to odd numbers. The lesson ends as the class tries to decide whether “Sean numbers” should be added to the list of numbers in their mathematics curriculum, but by then time has run out.”

Obviously I’m not a Common Core enthusiast.  Did you see the part that the teacher “suspends” her lesson plan to cover something totally ridiculous as naming numbers “Sean numbers”?  The immediate question is…….. when will they cover what they were supposed to do THAT DAY?  Tomorrow?  If so, what will be missed on the test because the Smarter Balanced Assessment is tightly wound so everything covered in class, is used on the test… Will each of these children lose 150 points because they missed a most important element of multiplication, because they were kept behind by talking about “Sean numbers”?  Remember the test examples we showed you, so complicated that adults cannot even figure out what is being asked?

This is ruining children… Remember where we said the child’s brain is growing and must get a certain amount of knowledge in on a timely fashion, or it is lost forever?  How does spending a full day on Sean numbers, probably something everyone in the class except Sean had already grasped, help a child in this race against time?

Most of all, this is an example of taking something really simple…. and making it really complicated….  This is exactly why Common Core is so rotten at it’s core….

Remember in high school where certain cliques made up certain rules, and everyone in-the-know had to follow them, and those not in-the-know, were ostracized and put down?  I want you to keep this in mind as we go through the rest of Mr. White’s essay….. 

Whose pupils, Teacher A’s, B’s, or C’s, would do better on Common Core standards? Teacher A seems out of step with the Common Core values as she was not even curious about Sean’s reasoning, although she did explicitly correct what she took to be his error. Teacher B went further in exploring Sean’s reasoning, surely something expected in the Common Core, but Sean was more or less left with the idea he was not doing anything worthwhile mathematically. Teacher C seems to embody the Common Core’s values of having Sean “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, reason abstractly and quantitatively, construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, attend to precision, look for and make use of structure.” Teacher C moreover encourages the whole class to accept the Common Core goals and see what more Sean and his classmates could make mathematically of his unconventional idea.

Did you get that?  Teacher C embodies Common Core’s rules the best… Whoo Hoo… Give him/her a prize!…  No comment or discussion if those rules are even good for children … It is a blind-set:  these are the rules and we must follow them….  Now if you like this example of creative thinking, it is because you are only thinking of Sean. You are ignoring its impact on all the other students… In the opposite approach to Common Core, where you would have an 11:1 student teacher ratio, a teacher could take such time with Sean and then cover her other 10 people.  But in a class of 20, 22, 24, 28, 30?  Most of the children are sitting through this discussion going: “this is really stupid; I hate school….”

Now, in Mr. White’s essay, since we are starting with the premise that Common Core is good for children, notice the evaluations given to Teachers A-C.

But what about those who gave Teacher C low marks, sometimes the lowest marks? Their concerns fell into three categories, all worrisome for the future of the Common Core. Most worrisome were those who felt Sean had made an error that had to be corrected and because of that, it was a mistake to let his error contaminate the whole class. Others felt the teacher’s mistake was pedagogical because having the error named after the student inappropriately shamed him. Others felt that Teacher C simply wasted valuable time as this “odd/even number” conjecture was never going to be on a standardized curriculum test and they, and their districts, want their teachers to focus on what the state will test. Clearly, the topic of numbers being both odd and even has no mathematical future and is not going to be raised by anyone ever again.

Forgive me.  They all sound good to me… Read them over again…. 

But that would not cause this post to be written.  Mr. White completely disagrees…..

Sean, of course, has not made a mistake, and as his conjecture shows, and as too many faculty and students overlooked, he fully grasps the principle that Teachers A and B taught. He is in fact doing the kind of thinking that the Common Core standards also hope to see when they ask students to “make sense of problems and persevere in solving them, reason abstractly and quantitatively, construct viable arguments and critique the reasoning of others, attend to precision, look for and make use of structure,” and so forth….

And this is deemed good for education?  As a standard it sounds noble, especially when italicized.  But in the example provided, it is completely ridiculous… And that is why Common Core is going to so confuse children, especially children in the inner cities who don’t get meals, who can’t do homework, who don’t have parents involved with their education because their night job gets them home at 11:50 pm…  2, 4, 6, 8, 10, are even… 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, are odd… any questions?  Let’s practice counting by evens… let’s practice counting by odds… everybody got it?  Recess.

I learned fine that way.  So did you. So did our whole generation.  So did the generation before them….  But now, we are encouraged to have a discussion about “Sean numbers” which to be honest, I couldn’t even follow because I had nothing to write with and draw a little map as to how Mr. White was explaining it…. 


Huh? Could you have handled that in 3rd Grade?

So we have confusion, instead of simplicity… For in Mr. White’s terminology, simplicity shows us:  

“The limitations in their subject matter and pedagogical knowledge *which) unfortunately foster the kind of conventional teaching that would undermine the larger goals of the Common Core and preserve the undesired status quo.

If simplicity undermines the larger goal of the Common Core and preserves the status quo, isn’t that now deemed by every parent of a student, to be a good thing?

Flat out, here is what is going on here….

Common Core is a very bad program that is impossible to teach, and impossible to grasp.  IT FAILS 70% OF ITS STUDENTS IN EVERY CLASS!  It is losing support with parents.

So what Bill Gates did, was whisk educators off to a green world where there was only one set of alternatives, an alternative universe so to speak… In that alternative universe, Common Core is spun as the most awesome thing that every happened…  Mr. White descends back to reality…  And suddenly, his ideas plop down in a real world where there are 30 students in a class, all going WTF is wrong with this teacher?  Please, STFU and lets learn something real. 

The Real world…  not Gates’ville… the real world…

This is an example of not being in the “real world”….

“The success on this counting task, if it is taken as an exemplary measure of the standard, means that some students will remain as baffled as were a countable number, but fortunately a relatively small number of participants in today’s teacher education programs buy the sense in which some numbers can be both odd and even.”


Wait a minute…. Did he just say that some numbers can be both odd… and even?  I think he did… How is that going to go over when tested to see if one is college or career ready?  “Sure, some numbers can be both odd and even.”

This is exactly what is wrong with Common Core… It is stupid. It is made-up bullshit.  It is fantasy.  it does not correspond to reality.  It has as much relationship to reality as does your attractiveness to the opposite sex being based solely on your beer which is the same as is in a commercial with attractive models… “Hey, slut! Go out with me, I drink Coors Lite.”

With regard to how we will know whether we have succeeded in the Common Core experiment, we won’t know for sure until the tests we mandate find a way to respect and reward the ingenuity of students like Sean….

By failing 70% of Delawares children… Why?  Because they don’t know that numbers can be both odd and even…. 

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why there is considerable pushback on Common Core.  it is farcical. The chickens are running the farm and the real teachers, are being called ridiculous… They aren’t ridiculous.  Common Core is what is ridiculous and anyone who tries to rank teachers according to Common Core, will set learning back greatly…

Just remember, that in its effort to resell Common Core to the masses, this op-ed of Mr. White was its high point: “stating that number can be both odd and even…. “

That is Common Core.  That is why all parents are against it.













The bottom get pissed on.






Ways To Share More Broadly.





  • All the rest: no change….  


































Ways to fight this… very important on this Labor Day…











Please Riot Here














